Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return To Accuse U.S.

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 23, 2006

Hundreds of noncitizens were swept up on visa violations in the weeks after 9/11, held for months in a much-criticized federal detention center in Brooklyn as ''persons of interest'' to terror investigators, and then deported. This week, one of them is back in New York and another is due today -- the first to return to the United States.

They are no longer the accused but the accusers, among six former detainees who are coming back to give depositions in their federal lawsuits against top government officials and detention guards, at a time when the constitutionality of part of the government's counterterrorism offensive is under new scrutiny.

As in the cases of all the Muslim immigrants rounded up in the New York area after the terror attacks, the six were never accused of a crime related to 9/11; officials eventually cleared all of them of links to terrorism. A report by the inspector general of the Justice Department found systemic problems with immigrant detentions and widespread abuse at the federal detention center where the six had been held; several guards have since been disciplined.

But as the six return to the city -- four of them from Egypt, one from Pakistan, one from London -- the conditions imposed by the United States government include the requirement that they be in the constant custody of federal marshals.

They are barred from calling anyone during their weeklong stays at an undisclosed New York hotel, where 12 days of closed depositions are to begin today. They can expect hours of questioning by lawyers representing at least 31 defendants in the lawsuits, including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.

The first returning detainees, Yasser and Hany Ibrahim, who are brothers, say that putting themselves back in the hands of the government they are suing is an act of faith in America. In recent telephone interviews from Alexandria, Egypt, the two described themselves as frightened but resolute in pressing a 2002 class-action lawsuit charging that they were abused and deprived of due process because of their religion or national origin.

''I'm seeking justice,'' said Yasser, 33, who had a Web site design business in Brooklyn before he and Hany, 29, a deli worker, were delivered in shackles to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn 19 days after 9/11. ''It's from the same system that did us injustice before. But I have faith in this system. I know what happened before was a mistake.''

Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said officials would not comment on any aspect of the case, including the conditions of the men's return to the city and their allegations. But in court papers, the defendants deny wrongdoing, and department lawyers argue in part that the Sept. 11 attacks created ''special factors'' -- including the need to detect and deter future terrorist attacks -- that outweigh the plaintiffs' right to sue for damages for any constitutional violations.

The detainees' lawyers say that what happened at the Brooklyn detention center can be recognized four years later as the template for many of the counterterrorism measures now being fiercely challenged.

''The post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps were the first example of the Bush administration's willingness to ignore the law and hold people outside the judicial system,'' said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Ibrahim brothers. ''The kind of torture, interrogation and arbitrary detention that we now associate with Guant?mo and secret C.I.A. facilities really started right here, in Brooklyn.''

Richard Peter Caro, a lawyer for Stuart Pray, the lieutenant who oversaw the detainees' arrival at the detention center, said yesterday: ''We're glad that they're coming in to be deposed so we can really get at the facts and finally see what the evidence shows. I'm confident that my client will be found to have committed no wrongdoing at all.''

Last week, the center filed a class-action suit against President Bush and other administration officials over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants. Ms. Meeropol is one of the plaintiffs, contending that her communications with clients like the Ibrahims may have been monitored illegally. The government says the surveillance program is a legal and valuable tool in the war on terror.

Illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations was one of the abuses documented at the Brooklyn detention center in a scathing 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report also found a pattern of physical abuse, some of it caught on prison videotape, including beatings and sexual humiliations like those described by the Ibrahim brothers or other former detainees. The report said it was Mr. Ashcroft's policy to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances took months and many detainees were immigrants picked up by chance.